Heading for Euston Station … TFL app … will my train journey home be any easier than the one up?

Coming into town, the combination of an unexpected chill with totally unforeseen leaf fall (in Autumn – who knew?) led to both local lines grinding to a halt. Fortunately ActorLaddie swung into action and ubered me to a tube station. Lunch with InfantPhenomenon made on time.

“Only ten minutes to go,” says Laura. “You’re doing brilliantly. If you’re finding it difficult, you can slow down a little.”

You know what, Laura – I really can’t. If I slow down any more, I will be running backwards. If you could really truly see me, you be much more likely to suggest, in the words of the good Doctor, that I get a shift on.

As a novelist, says Anna Burns, her job is “to show up and be present and attend. It’s a waiting process.” She “just had to wait for my characters to tell me their stories.”(Interview by Alison Flood in The Guardian, 16 Oct ’18)

This obviously worked for Anna Burns as she has just bagged the Booker Prize with her novel Milkman.

I, however, have spent a lifetime waiting for characters to turn up and write themselves into a book but they haven’t done so yet and I’m rather starting to fear they never will. I go to bed having put out my finest stationery but masterpieces come there none. Not so much as a shopping list; not so much as a tweet. Perhaps the characters have used up all their best ideas writing other people’s books. They have no more twists.

“In those days, there was usually an intermission between each act during which the audience – and the actors – would get refreshments. One night, the great actor Edmund Kean was giving his Hamlet but by the end of the fourth interval found himself so refreshed that he couldn’t remember Act V. He could, however, remember Act V of Lear – which he’d done the previous week – so they did that instead.”

Can you hear me, mother? Have to keep the noise down: I find myself at the centre of a supersize game of Sardines. If anyone else twigs that we’re here and tries to join us, the density levels may prove fatal.

“So, have you been to the Minack before?” I ask, when we have a lull in the programme selling.

“Oh yes, lots of times! A few years ago, we did The Producers. As we were bringing in the props – crates of swastikas and Nazi banners and so on, we passed a party of German tourists.” FellowProgrammeSeller grimaces a little. “It was all a bit awkward, really. Would you like a programme?”

It’s going to rain tomorrow: storms, they’ve promised storms. A real proper-promise with little pictures of thunderbolts and lightening, very very frightening me, Galileo, galileo . .. Actually, can you have a picture of Thunder? Whatever – they’ve promised storms.

Which will be very welcome because here in London it’s been toasty warm of late. What’s that? Passed you by, did it? Easy to miss, I know; hardly been on the news at all. I’m writing this in the garden, in the dark, at ten o’clock at night; inside it’s still thirty degrees. But that’s ok because tomorrow, it rains.

On which basis, ActorLaddie and I have been addressing our butts in preparation for said promised rainstorm.

“There’s a woman who comes to all ‘The Bridge’ related events dressed as Saga – leather trousers and everything. She even has the same car!” (Sofia Helin)

Now, I adore Detective Saga Noren as much as the next person and would love her to end the series living happily with Henrik and his ghost children – though I’m not holding my breath. But there’s fandom and then there’s weird. Reading interviews and blogs is OK; dressing in leather trousers and following the actor who plays her, borders on the obsessive.